u/queenofgoats

Hi r/darkacademia! I'm looking for a couple first-round beta readers for my adult academic fantasy novel, THE ARCHIVISTS. 97,000 words across 30 chapters. It’s gone through several rounds of self-editing, and I’m looking for folks to do a read-and-react and point out inconsistencies, plot holes, missed opportunities for characterization, etc. Will send a Google Doc link, and appreciate comments left anywhere and everywhere!

THE VIBES:

•  Dark academia-ish, but the academics are adults with jobs
•  “Congratulations on your prestigious fellowship! Unfortunately, it is cursed.”
•  Scholarship as literal magic
•  Ensemble cast / found-family-ish cohort dynamics
•  Competent, ambitious heroine
•  Brilliant, distractible love interest
•  Colleagues -> research partners -> oh no
•  Everyone has their own flavor of dysfunction
• SPICE:  1/ 5 (yearning, flirting, and physical intimacy; no explicit content)

BLURB:

Art history professor Cora Chamberlain has spent her career becoming exactly the person academia rewards: polished, brilliant, disciplined, and increasingly uncertain who she is beneath it all. When she’s selected for a prestigious fellowship at the secretive Institute of Applied Humanities, she expects ivy-covered buildings, academic rivalries, and a year of career-making research. Instead, she discovers that magic is real, the Institute is responsible for keeping reality intact, and that one of the seven fellows will ultimately be chosen to maintain the mysterious Archive at the center of it all. As Cora grows close to Benny Hartwell, a brilliant but awkward narratologist, their investigation into a vanished novelist’s journal begins exposing secrets the Institute would rather keep buried. Because the fellowship isn’t quite the opportunity Cora thought she’d earned–and becoming the best candidate in the room may cost her everything she has left of herself.

FIRST PAGE:

The fan on Cora’s desk did nothing but move heat around. 

When she’d been allocated the room in the corner of the top floor of the university’s art building, Cora had wondered why none of the senior faculty had wanted the office with the windows. Within her first week, she’d understood why–from ten in the morning until seven at night, the sun turned the room into an oven, even with the shades down. Although long practiced at ignoring her own discomfort, Cora was becoming more aware by the second that a generous application of clinical-strength antiperspirant had not been sufficient to keep her from sweating through her blouse, even with her hair clipped up off the back of her neck. 

She’d been there since seven that morning, grading essays from one of her summer sessions. All of them recycled the same handful of half-remembered talking points from her lectures, shuffled and rewritten with generous assistance from an AI chatbot. Western Art Survey II, Cora had begun to suspect, was karmic punishment for some horrible thing she’d done in a past life. No matter how carefully she taught, her students managed to produce masterpieces of confident inaccuracy; the last essay she’d read had continually referred to Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait as “the wedding painting.”

Whereas other professors' desk drawers were full of paperclips and dried-out pens, Cora’s contained body spray, an extra stick of antiperspirant, and handfuls of surprisingly absorbent napkins stolen from the campus coffee shop. The drawer stuck in the humidity, requiring her to brace one knee against the frame and pull. 

Her desk was meticulously organized, because an orderly office kept Cora’s thoughts away from bigger, more unmanageable problems, like her stalled research, her mother’s last email, or the way her stomach soured when anyone mentioned the department budget. So when she wrenched open the drawer and saw the envelope, Cora knew, instantly, that she had not put it there. It was made of a heavy, cream-colored paper, unmarked except for her name and title in thick serif type: Dr. Cora Chamberlain.

A perfunctory knock jarred her office door, which she’d propped open for airflow. “Cora,” said her department chair, leaning in without waiting for an invitation. “You got a minute?”

Looking for a couple first-round beta readers for my adult academic fantasy novel, THE ARCHIVISTS. 97,000 words across 30 chapters. It’s gone through several rounds of self-editing, and I’m looking for folks to do a read-and-react and point out inconsistencies, plot holes, missed opportunities for characterization, etc. Will send a Google Doc link, and appreciate comments left anywhere and everywhere!

THE VIBES:

•  Dark academia, but the academics are adults with jobs
•  “Congratulations on your prestigious fellowship! Unfortunately, it is cursed.”
•  Scholarship as literal magic
•  Ensemble cast / found-family-ish cohort dynamics
•  Competent, ambitious heroine
•  Brilliant, distractible love interest
•  Colleagues -> research partners -> oh no
•  Everyone has their own flavor of dysfunction
• SPICE:  1/ 5 (yearning, flirting, and physical intimacy; no explicit content)

BLURB:

Art history professor Cora Chamberlain has spent her career becoming exactly the person academia rewards: polished, brilliant, disciplined, and increasingly uncertain who she is beneath it all. When she’s selected for a prestigious fellowship at the secretive Institute of Applied Humanities, she expects ivy-covered buildings, academic rivalries, and a year of career-making research. Instead, she discovers that magic is real, the Institute is responsible for keeping reality intact, and that one of the seven fellows will ultimately be chosen to maintain the mysterious Archive at the center of it all. As Cora grows close to Benny Hartwell, a brilliant but awkward narratologist, their investigation into a vanished novelist’s journal begins exposing secrets the Institute would rather keep buried. Because the fellowship isn’t quite the opportunity Cora thought she’d earned–and becoming the best candidate in the room may cost her everything she has left of herself.

FIRST PAGE:

The fan on Cora’s desk did nothing but move heat around. 

When she’d been allocated the room in the corner of the top floor of the university’s art building, Cora had wondered why none of the senior faculty had wanted the office with the windows. Within her first week, she’d understood why–from ten in the morning until seven at night, the sun turned the room into an oven, even with the shades down. Although long practiced at ignoring her own discomfort, Cora was becoming more aware by the second that a generous application of clinical-strength antiperspirant had not been sufficient to keep her from sweating through her blouse, even with her hair clipped up off the back of her neck. 

She’d been there since seven that morning, grading essays from one of her summer sessions. All of them recycled the same handful of half-remembered talking points from her lectures, shuffled and rewritten with generous assistance from an AI chatbot. Western Art Survey II, Cora had begun to suspect, was karmic punishment for some horrible thing she’d done in a past life. No matter how carefully she taught, her students managed to produce masterpieces of confident inaccuracy; the last essay she’d read had continually referred to Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait as “the wedding painting.”

Whereas other professors' desk drawers were full of paperclips and dried-out pens, Cora’s contained body spray, an extra stick of antiperspirant, and handfuls of surprisingly absorbent napkins stolen from the campus coffee shop. The drawer stuck in the humidity, requiring her to brace one knee against the frame and pull. 

Her desk was meticulously organized, because an orderly office kept Cora’s thoughts away from bigger, more unmanageable problems, like her stalled research, her mother’s last email, or the way her stomach soured when anyone mentioned the department budget. So when she wrenched open the drawer and saw the envelope, Cora knew, instantly, that she had not put it there. It was made of a heavy, cream-colored paper, unmarked except for her name and title in thick serif type: Dr. Cora Chamberlain.

A perfunctory knock jarred her office door, which she’d propped open for airflow. “Cora,” said her department chair, leaning in without waiting for an invitation. “You got a minute?”